alx84

So I bought a soldering air gun and removed the SSD chip. So I have MaskROM all the time I booted up with SD card (with Multitool on it) but symptoms are quite the same - in UART I can see the system is still complaining on memory: user@x1:~$ picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0 picocom v3.1 port is : /dev/ttyUSB0 flowcontrol : none baudrate is : 115200 parity is : none databits are : 8 stopbits are : 1 escape is : C-a local echo is : no noinit is : no noreset is : no hangup is : no nolock is : no send_cmd is : sz -vv receive_cmd is : rz -vv -E imap is : omap is : emap is : crcrlf,delbs, logfile is : none initstring : none exit_after is : not set exit is : no Type [C-a] [C-h] to see available commands Terminal ready DDR version 1.15 20190428 ID:0xFFF In col error ERR My current guesses are: - either there's something wrong with the memory initialization blobs, that are coming with Multitool. I need to find a way to replace them or configure them to use different clock speed / timings / whatever - or my memory chips (or their power supply) are busted

UART on this board is three pads marked with a light blue on my above shots. Middle pad is ground, left is TX right is RX. Bought a cheap USB RTL dongle and was able to read boot messages - it seems that the board doesn't like the RAM blob that came with that most recent armbian: user@x1:~/Downloads$ picocom -b 1500000 /dev/ttyUSB0 picocom v3.1 port is : /dev/ttyUSB0 flowcontrol : none baudrate is : 1500000 parity is : none databits are : 8 stopbits are : 1 escape is : C-a local echo is : no noinit is : no noreset is : no hangup is : no nolock is : no send_cmd is : sz -vv receive_cmd is : rz -vv -E imap is : omap is : emap is : crcrlf,delbs, logfile is : none initstring : none exit_after is : not set exit is : no Type [C-a] [C-h] to see available commands Terminal ready DDR version 1.16 20190713 ID:0xFFF In col error ERR Next task is to find the CLK for eMMC

I have this very revision of the board -"RK3318_V1.4 202303.200629". Was able to install recent armbian (https://armbian.com/boards/rk3318-box) and it even booted once, right after installation - but that was the last time I've seen this board booting The only thing I've managed to do is to attempt to connect to my WiFi - but that was it. All my further attempts to boot it were failed. Current state is - upon power up the board is lighting up it's RED LED and without any HDMI output. What I've tried, and what didn't work: - powering the board up with the SD card plugged in - the one that has a multitool and the very same one, that was used to format the EMMC and copy armbian image on it - power the board up while pressing or hodling "boot" button (it's behind the 3.5 mm audio jack) I guess the internal EMMC got corrupted or bootloader got damaged and I need to bypass it. And given the EMMC chip is BGA that might be troublesome. I'll try to find UART port on the board, but appreciate if someone who already found it will share his knowledge. Right now I have few suspects:

The link from the original post is dead